6th part of the online dialogue series "Security and development policy consequences of climate change in Africa"

January 25th, 2023 | 4:00 p.m. - 5:30 p.m. | via Zoom

The five previous events in the dialogue series have made it clear that Africa is particularly affected by the security and development policy effects of climate change. The consequences of global warming such as droughts, landslides and floods are felt on the continent much more severely than the global average, according to a report by the World Weather Organization (WMO), for example. According to the WMO, people living in extreme poverty will be particularly hard hit by the effects of climate change - up to 118 million people are expected by 2030.

It is all the more important to identify successful pilot projects that aim to slow down climate change and cushion its complex consequences, and then to work out to what extent it makes sense and is possible to transfer these projects and their ideas to other regions of Africa.

The large well-known projects include the Great Green Wall Initiative (GGWI), which was initiated in 2007 by the African Union (AU) to combat desertification and which aims to create a green belt 15 kilometers wide and 7,000 kilometers long, extending from Dakar to extend across eleven Saharan countries to Djibouti. Another project is the Clean Oceans Initiative: The modernization of South Africa's outdated and overburdened sewage treatment plants is intended to prevent unfiltered sewage from flowing into the sea in the future, thereby reducing the enormous additional stress on ecosystems already severely affected by climate change.

Significant opportunities for cooperation also exist economically, which should on the one hand mitigate climate change and help develop the African region. This applies, for example, to so-called green hydrogen, which is intended to be a key element of the global energy transition. According to the "Green Hydrogen Potential Atlas" - a project of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) - there is immense potential for a hydrogen partnership between Germany and West Africa. The region has the potential to produce up to 165,000 TWh of green hydrogen annually, while the production costs for this would be around a third lower than in Germany thanks to renewable energies.

In the final part of the dialogue series "Security and development policy consequences of climate change in Africa", our experts deal with the evaluation of current pilot projects throughout Africa that contribute to mitigating climate change and its consequences and discuss transfer and upscaling challenges also European-African cooperation potentials and their social and economic benefits for people in both urban and rural regions of Africa.

Welcoming remarks:

Dr. Enrico Fels
Managing Director of the Center for Advanced Security, Strategic and Integration Studies; University of Bonn

Impulse lectures and subsequent discussion:

Prof. Dr. Anna-Katharina Hornidge
IDOS, Bonn

Prof. Dr. Rolf Steltemeier
Director of the UNIDO ITPO Deutschland

Jochen Renger 
Head of Department for Climate, Rural Development, Infrastructure;
German Society for International Cooperation (GIZ)

Gerhard Quincke
Regional Manager Southern Africa Region, DVV International

Sebastian Vagt
Head of the FNF Office in Morocco

Moderator:

Iris Müller
Advisor at the North Rhine-Westphalia State Office of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom

Q&A